Optimal design of multiple arithmetic processor-based robot controllers

In this paper we discuss preliminary design considerations for the optimal design of multiple-apu (arithmetic processing unit) based robot controllers. We justify this design interms of its ability to adopt to various different control, kinematic and trajectory computation methods which are being developed. We then show that with eight apu's, it is possible to compute the inverse kinematics, inverse dynamics and the trajectory for the PUMA arm in less then 3ms. In this design we assume the floating point processing times of a relatively slow 16.7 MHZ 68881.